Rangers magic 2, p.19
Ranger's Magic 2, page 19
“Dissatisfaction grew into anger, and anger grew into a powerful organization,” Bren said. “We had the advantage of being joined by many highly-trained people, and being well-funded. Our organization grew. We called ourselves the Restoration, and within a year we had sympathetic people in place near to almost every influential part of the state. Our great coup came when we learned that King Tullian V himself was sympathetic to our cause, but that he was unable to do anything for himself because the Black Spire had such a tight grip on the reins of power.”
Sena spoke up again, “In the Black Spire, the experiments in dark magic became more and more inhumane and disturbing. The Naxos were created, a dedicated force of twisted and evil magicians whose only purpose was to crush dissent. The Black Spire sought to create new kinds of power, and they tried all kinds of experiments, trying to create super soldiers who could be used to crush the elves. Despite their attempts to keep it all secret, rumors leaked out about what they were doing. I, and a few others, learned also about the Restoration, and we fled the Spire, hoping that we could join the revolution and help to deliver our people from the terror of the Black Spire and their adherents.”
“And she found us,” Bren said, smiling at Sena. Sena reached across to touch him companionably on the arm.
King Harald sat forward. “I’m glad to hear that the humans have stood up to their oppressors in this way,” he said. “But what of your message? What have you come here to say? For it seems that you are leading up to something, some request or some offer? I would hear it.”
“Very well,” Sena said. “You are right, of course. We bring both an offer and a request, as your majesty so perceptively guesses. We of the Restoration bring you an offer of peace between the human realms and the elven realms; peace, what’s more, that will be guaranteed forever. We do not wish for war; we wish for trade and traffic between our two realms, and we wish to help each other, to share technology and discoveries, as it is said in our legends and tales used to be the case between our peoples.”
“It’s true,” Harald said sadly. “Those days may be a matter of legend to you, but I am old enough to remember them. Before the Sundering, indeed, the humans and the elves were closely allied, and we worked together on many things, not just trade. Those were good days for both peoples, and both our kingdoms prospered. I would have it so again, yes, I would. But it seems to me that from what you say, you are not in a position to be offering such a treaty. Widespread as your Restoration may be, it has not yet acted to regain power over the lands of Venetia. The Black Spire still holds sway, do they not?”
“They do,” Sena said, “and that brings me to my request. The Restoration is indeed widespread, but not widespread enough that we can retake power from the Black Spire at a stroke. The mages of the Spire have some power over the people, some way of controlling their minds and thoughts. But there is something that they fear more than anything else—an item, a legendary artifact that’s said to lie in a place to the north of here, down the Red River, a place the humans call the Daurgozh.”
“What is that place?” Harald said, frowning, his eyes filling suddenly with wariness. “If I know anything about human languages, the word Daurgozh means something like ‘haunted city by the falls,’ is that not right?”
“It is,” Sena said. “The Black Spire are terrified that their enemies will find this thing—whatever it is—that lies in the Daurgozh, because it will break their control over their minions. We do not know where the Daurgozh is, except that it lies deep within your lands. So, we’ve come here to ask if you will help us to find the haunted city by the falls, and if you will give us the safe passage we need to get there through your lands. If we can find this item, we will use it to break the hold of the Black Spire on the power structure in Venetia, and to restore King Tullian V and the council of dukes to their rightful power. In return, we offer you everlasting peace, a military alliance, and an opening of trade between our realms until the end of time. Will you help us?”
“It seems that you ask us to help you to achieve something that’s far from certain,” Commander Rayne said. “We have only your word that this Restoration exists at all, and that it’s as widespread and ready to take control as you say. For all we know, you could be spies on behalf of the Black Spire, come to spy out our secrets, or to find this powerful item and use it to your advantage in the war.”
Harald gave Rayne a cool look. “Have you learned nothing over the years, little brother?” he said wearily. “You have done well here at the garrison, and you are a fine commander, but I fear you are less of a judge of character. Look at their faces, Rayne. Can you not see the truth there?”
Rayne nodded reluctantly. “I see it,” he said, “but I still think that we should be cautious…”
Suddenly Akhen spoke up. “If you will permit me to speak,” he said, “there is something I have been keeping to myself that I think must now be told.”
“Very well, Akhen,” Rayne said. “Go ahead. You may speak.”
Akhen sighed and leaned forward on the table, resting his head in his hands for a moment, then raising his face to look around them all.
“Since before we set out on this mission to the human borders, I have been worried about something. Ralnor, a person whose judgment and instincts I put great trust in, had a vision before we left.”
“Akhen!” Ralnor said, horrified that what he saw as simply a lapse after a heavy training session was about to be shared with the commander and the king.
“It must be told, Ralnor,” Akhen said, then went on, “The vision was of a place that could only be the Forbidden City, the ancient capital of the elven realm before the Sundering. Ralnor described it to me perfectly, even including the great waterfall of Thunder Falls to the south of the city. He described an evil power there, occupying the high tower of the castle that sits at the highest point of the city, and a blue light shining from the Sorcerer’s Tower.”
“Daurgozh,” Sena breathed. “The haunted city by the falls! It must be the Forbidden City!”
“I believe so,” Akhen said. “Since that vision, I have seen several things that have troubled me. I’ve seen spirit trees glowing blue on the plain. In the dungeon where Lana almost died, we fought a horde of undead humans—corpses raised from death in an ancient tomb lit with blue lights. Such things have not been seen in the world since the first hundred years after the Sundering, when the portal that had been created at the moment of the Sundering was still open.”
“Well do I remember that time,” Harald said, closing his eyes for a moment as if with remembered pain. “The dead walked, and that evil blue light seemed to be everywhere in those days.”
“Exactly,” Akhen said. “And in the tomb, we found the Amulet of Shem, an ancient item from before the Sundering, one of the legendary five chalices. When the Sundering portal opened, its power took over all the five chalices, and when it closed, they never worked again. And yet the Amulet of Shem did work. It healed Ralnor and Lana, saving Lana from death.”
“And what do you think this means?” Harald said, though from his tone Ralnor thought the king already knew the answer to his own question.
Akhen stood, planting his hands on the table before him and looking around at them all. “My friends,” he said, “I believe that someone—or something—has gone to the Forbidden City and reopened the Sundering portal. All the signs point to that. I believe that this Daurgozh that Sena speaks of is the forbidden city, and that we must go there and find out what is happening. Perhaps we will find the item that Sena speaks of, but perhaps we will find something else, something worse.”
“What do you fear, Akhen?” King Harald asked.
“Your majesty,” Akhen said. “What I fear is that the Black Spire have gotten there already. What I fear is that we are too late.”
Chapter 12
Everyone sat silent for a moment, stunned by this revelation. The Sundering portal, a gaping hole in the very fabric of reality, had been torn open by the devastating power of the Sundering three hundred years ago. Parlax the mage had sacrificed himself, absorbing a great portion of the power that was released in that terrible, awesome blast, but even with that mitigation the impact had been enormous and the portal had opened.
For a hundred years, it had remained open, and from it had come not only monsters of unimaginable horror, but also a stream of energy that changed the very nature of reality. The energy affected plants, animals, and trees, turning them into monstrous versions of themselves. And most horribly, it caused the dead to rise, as mindless, ravenous monsters that bore no resemblance to who they had been in life.
A century had passed, during which time the humans, the elves, and the other peoples of the northern world had fought a desperate battle for survival. After a hundred years, the portal had closed again, and the effects had faded from the world. The elves did not know what had caused the portal to close, but the humans had a tale that it had been a mighty human warrior that had caused it, a hero they had no name for, who had fought his way single handed to the portal and used his own grasp of magic to close it forever.
Whatever the truth of this, the idea that it might have been deliberately re-opened by a mage from the Black Spire was terrifying to everyone sitting around the commander’s table that evening. To Harald, who had actually lived through those days, the idea of a return to the chaos of the century after the Sundering was almost more than he could bear.
To Akhen, who had earnestly studied magical history, theory, and practice for years beyond count, the idea that anyone should do such a thing in the quest for power was repugnant. He hated the use of magic simply as a tool to gain power, and anger flowed through him at the idea, particularly now he had heard the story of the Black Spire, who they were, and what they were capable of.
For Bren and Sena, the news meant less than to those who knew more about the history of magic, and of the world. The humans did not fully understand what was meant by the Sundering portal, but they understood that anything which gained more power for the Black Spire was one step closer to their doom, and the doom of the kingdom and land that they loved and called home.
Lana and Ralnor looked at each other. For Lana, the news felt like an inevitability, and she realized in that moment that she had suspected something like this. All Akhen’s hints and evasions over the last while, Ralnor’s visions, and the strange signs of magic they had all seen…somehow, she had felt that it would lead to this—the reactivating of that legendary portal that had been the cause of all the trouble for the last three hundred years. Fate coming full circle.
Ralnor felt the pull of fate within him. The news was bad, of course, but like Lana he had suspected that something of the kind was coming. On the grassy plain outside the undead king’s tomb, he had felt nothing but malevolence and threat where his friends had felt powerfully that they should go into the chamber and seek what was there. Akhen and Lana had both said they felt the pull of fate.
Now it was his turn to feel that this was fated. He would go to the Forbidden City, he now knew. He would journey there, and would find there the source of the evil power. Perhaps he would even find the item that Sena and her band wanted, the item that would give them the power they needed to break the influence of the Black Spire over the court and the Kingdom of Venetia.
He would go. He would confront the thing that he had seen in the tower during his vision, and he would beat it. Fear warred in his breast with a sense of rightness, a sense of deep purpose that he felt was unavoidable.
The pull of fate.
Commander Rayne leaned forward on his table, putting his elbows on the flat surface and his head in his hands.
“Harald?” he said after a moment. “What do you say about this? Should they go? Do they have your blessing?”
“They do,” Harald said. “Rayne, this feels inevitable to me. I have long felt the pull of fate toward this, that’s why I went myself to the Forbidden City and retrieved Ralnor from the preservation chambers twenty years ago, because I felt that fate decreed it was time for that to happen. I could not deny the sense of fate I had then, and I can’t deny it now. I trust these humans. I trust them not only to tell the truth, but to travel north upriver to Highbough—the place that’s now called the Forbidden City—and to find and do whatever they can there. I don’t know what they seek anymore than they do, but if what Akhen says is true, then perhaps they will be able to find whoever has opened the portal too and settle that once and for all.”
“And I suppose,” Commander Rayne said heavily, “that Akhen, Ralnor, and company must go with them.”
“Correct,” Harald said. “I did not know what purpose Ralnor was going to play in all this when I brought him out of the preservation chambers and sent him here to learn his magic, but now I see that we have come to the moment that has been fated. Yes, Ralnor must go, and Akhen must go also. I leave it to them to choose who will go with them in their party, but these two at least must go. They are our best two magic workers, and whatever they find at the Forbidden City, they will need magic to tackle it.” He looked around the table.
“Sena, Bren,” Harald continued, looking at the humans with kindness and compassion in his eyes, “Commander Rayne and I accept your peace treaty. I will allow you to travel north through my lands, to the place that you have called Daurgozh. I know where and what it is—it’s without doubt the place that we call the Forbidden City, the capital of the elven empire back in the simpler days before the Sundering. You shall go, and Ralnor and Akhen shall go with you, and whoever else you choose for your party. What is more, when you return, which I have no doubt you shall, I shall help you further. We can plan together, and if there is any way of getting messages between here and the Restoration back in Venetia, we will do so. I will help you, if I can, to bring about the overthrow of the Black Spire and the regaining of the land of Venetia for King Tullian V. I have been blessed with an enormously long life in my days as king, and if I can end them by bringing about the restoration of good relations between our two kingdoms, then I will die a happy and fulfilled elf.”
“We may not be able to undo the damage of the Sundering,” Rayne said, “but perhaps we can restore the good relations between our two peoples and end this pointless war.”
“This is all we hoped for and more,” Bren said with feeling. “Thank you. So what shall we do now? I am weary, and we have had a long journey, but I feel that we should make a plan of action before we leave here tonight.”
“I agree,” Commander Rayne said. He stood, and walking to the corner of the tent, he lifted a long rolled up piece of parchment from a chest. He flattened it out on the table in front of them.
“This is a map of the lands between here and the Forbidden City,” he said. “Here’s the Red River, that runs south to north, right past our outpost here and on to the sea. On foot, it would take a long time, maybe even as much as a month, to get from here to the Forbidden City, which is itself only a few miles from the northern sea. But if you were to take boats you could do the journey in a week, and it would perhaps be a much safer and easier way to travel than going across country through the river lands. The country alongside the river is not well-scouted, but there are people living out there, elves, certainly, but perhaps others too.”
“That sounds like the most sensible approach,” Ralnor said. “What will you do?”
“We will keep a defense up here against any further human encroachment,” Rayne said, “and Harald here has agreed to supply me—as the new commander of the outpost forts—with more and better troops, so I am not concerned about being overrun just yet. It will take a long time for the humans to muster another force such as the one that Malavax threw against us last month, and I hope that we may see nothing but the usual skirmishing between now and next spring. Winter is always a quieter time, and I will use it to train the new soldiers and maintain the barricades, and go on a tour of inspection of my new command. The forts have been badly handled in recent years. I plan to change that.”
“So, to the composition of our company,” Ralnor said. “I will go, of course, and I think Sena must as well.”
“And Farlo, and Lana,” Akhen said. “I will not be without them on this trip.”
Commander Rayne’s face twisted in a wry smile. “I suppose I will have to accept the loss of my armorer once again then,” he said. “It’s a shame, I won’t deny that Farlo had become indispensable as a supplier of arms and armor to the soldiers, but he has trained Burla well and I believe that he will do in the interim. This mission is important, and I agree with Akhen that all those who are trained in magic must go.”
“What about you, Bren?” Ralnor asked.
Bren shook his head. “I fear that it’s my duty to return to Venetia if I can, and to deliver the message to the agents of the Restoration. They must know what has passed here, and we must find a way of transmitting messages between here and Venetia. It should not be too difficult. There are now many agents of the Restoration within the Scouts who man the forts along Stoneheart’s Shield, and they are allowed to range freely into the Unclaimed Lands between the Shield and the elven outposts. I will see to it that our agents can get away from the Shield and meet with friendly Rangers to transmit messages. It will be slow, to be sure, and cumbersome, but we can do it, I think.”
“Will you take your folk with you?” Ralnor asked.
“Those that wish to go,” he said, “but there are many in my company who want nothing more than to get away from Venetia, and they will formally request asylum from Harald in due course, I think. They may stay here at the outpost and fight alongside the Rangers if you’re willing to have humans among your garrison, Commander Rayne?”
